Category Archives: List Candidates

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: GET MEAN (1976)

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DIRECTED BY: Ferdinando Baldi

FEATURING: Tony Anthony, , Lloyd Battista

PLOT: An abandoned town, a gypsy family, a very Spanish princess: enter, the Stranger. Offered $50,000 to ferry the displaced sovereign back home, before she can be reinstated there’s a question of reclaiming an ancient treasure. Alas, standing in the way of our Hero is a sadistic fop, a hot-tempered Mongol chieftain, and a Shakespeare-quoting hunchback.

Still from Get Mean (1976)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: By setting the bulk of his Spaghetti Western somewhere along the coast of Spain, Ferdinando Baldi’s Get Mean elicits an initial reaction of “oh realllly…,” then cranks things up to all the way to bizarre with its visionary combination of temporally and geographically misplaced clashing adversaries. Tony Anthony adds to this movie’s peculiar brand of “magic” with his gristly voice and an unceasingly sardonic grin in lieu of a stoic Clint Eastwood imitation. Toss in no fewer than three main villains, chin-stroking xenophobia, and a string of food motifs, and you’ve got yourself a Western.

COMMENTS: This breezy little movie starts off with weirdness hanging off its sleeve. A man (Tony Anthony) is being dragged through a desolate countryside past a mysterious reflective orb nestled among bedraggled plants. Pulled into an empty town, he stumbles into one of the buildings. Inside, of course, is a family of gypsies. The eldest woman of the group says, ominously, “We have been expecting you.” The Stranger accepts their task of bringing a Spanish princess back to her home country. After a quick brawl with some local toughs, one dressed in Mongol garb, the Stranger heads off on a burning-map travel montage. Starting from somewhere in the Great Lakes region and heading across the sea, within minutes we find the escort and his ward on the beaches of Spain, staring down two hostile armies.

By this time, things have not gone well for the stranger. Nor have things gone well for those who prefer a little historical accuracy, even in their Spaghetti Westerns. The rival bands are Moors, who in this world seem to be soldiers of the Spanish monarchy, and a clutch of barbarians, which explains the outfit of the baddie in the opening fight. I’m not certain how many Central Asian warriors are named Diego, but Get Mean taught me there’s at least one. Aiding the Mongol antagonist are a refined, bordering-on-maniacal hunchback (Lloyd Battista) and one of those caricatured homosexuals only found in ’70s movies. These three are keen on the power that can only be unlocked through the discovery of the ancient “Treasure of Rodrigo” (!).

Quips, beatings, explosions, and large firearms are scattered throughout the movie. These are to be expected in a low budget Western. Less expected is the Stranger’s trial in a quasi-Land of the Dead. Conniving with the hunchback, the Stranger infiltrates an ancient mosque that has teamed up with Christian clergy. He squares off against the psychic attacks of unhappy undead in a chapel, travels through some chintzy-looking caves, and dispatches perhaps the least effective treasure guardian ever encountered in cinema. Enough? Heavens no — an explosion renders him black(face)ened for a stretch, during which he matches wits with a wild bull in the middle of nowhere. Get Mean‘s writer and director have cheerily decided to throw believability to the wind in pursuit of a movie that looks like what might’ve happened had ever tried his hand at the Western genre.

Tony Anthony’s performance is reminiscent of something by Clint Eastwood’s illegitimate half-brother. We know he’s either in for travel or trouble whenever a very jaunty, very Spaghetti tune gears up—perhaps the only note of consistency to be found in the movie. The combined elements of this Western set over 4,000 miles East of the Mississippi were enough to make me wonder what the heck would happen next. Sadly, Get Mean was ignored upon release and didn’t find a cult following in the intervening four decades. Thankfully, that did not stop the good people at Blue Underground from resurrecting it. Perhaps over the next forty years Get Mean might find the fringe adoration that eluded it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of the strangest and most obscure spaghetti westerns ever to come out of Italy…”–TV Guide

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: ENTERTAINMENT (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Rick Alverson

FEATURING: Gregg Turkington

PLOT: A low-rent insult comedian who performs in a tux with a grotesque combover plays unappreciative dive bars throughout the Southwest on an increasingly surreal tour.

Still from Entertainment (2015)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: After another failed gig, the Comedian’s friend, a business consultant, suggests that the performer consider making his act “a little less weird.” We disagree.

COMMENTS: I appreciate a bad joke. It’s hard to write a bit that has the shape of a joke, complete with a setup and a punchline, but then fails to land properly—not something completely random, but a crack that’s just barely off, a jibe that an alien or madman might think is funny. Comedy interruptus: a joke that perversely strangles its own payoff. (Judd Nelson’s painful, sweaty monologues in The Dark Backward were built around a similar premise, although The American Astronaut‘s rambling “Hertz doughnut” bit is the most successful iteration of the trope I can think of). The nameless comedian of Entertainment deals exclusively is such jokes: he starts off with premises like “Why don’t rapists eat at TGI Fridays?” There is no possible successful punchline to that set-up; the joke, rather, is that any comedian would have such poor taste that he would even try out such a line.

The meta gets piled high in Entertainment. The Comedian’s routine, delivered from under a carefully styled oily combover, might have gone over with a crowd of irony-digging college hipsters, but he’s trying it out in working class gin joints. “I’ve traveled a long distance carrying these jokes in order to bring them here and thrust them into your fool faces,” he complains on stage, after a poke at prop comic Carrot Top earns him only a few token titters. At a country club gig, he improvises a bit where he picks up a trophy and pretends to shoot the audience, then makes fart noises for a couple of minutes before dropping the mike and walking off stage. “We’re not paying for that,” is the icy, but reasonable, response of the lady who booked him. There’s something horrifyingly Sisyphean in the idea of a comic who’s compelled to take the stage and bomb night after night in front of a disdainful crowd of miserabilist drunks.

The rest of the tour, the blank-faced Comedian stays in motel rooms or crashes on couches. He spends his free time alone taking in the desert sights (a car mysteriously upended in the middle of nowhere seems like the perfect metaphor for his own inexplicable career) or leaving pathetically mundane, never-answered messages on his estranged daughter’s phone. Between the melancholy vignettes and embarrassing failed comedy routines are plenty of surreal sights, particularly in the film’s last half hour. The tour increasingly takes its toll on the Comedian’s mental state, as events grow more and more fragmented and panicky towards the end. Public restrooms are particularly anxious locales; one of the film’s best scenes involves an ambiguous meeting with a nervous hanging out at an isolated rest stop, while another bathroom produces an even more scarring vision. The Comedian hangs out with a crowd who look like the Southwestern cousins of the folks from Gummo (I kept expecting a chair-bashing session to break out), leading to more odd moments. A hallucinatory guest spot on a Mexican telenovela rounds out the strangeness. Throughout, the soundtrack is omnipresent and intense, with a mix of anxious ambient drones and popular music numbers that range from the ethereal to the ironic. The overall effect is like discovering Andy Kaufman’s old Tony Clifton character has a tragic backstory and suffers from chronic depression, then watching his mental breakdown from the inside. The film is a bleak vision of complete artistic and personal frustration, yet it rings hellishly true.

Though the character is never named, star Gregg Turkington uses the same gimmick (minus the existential despair) when he performs as “Neil Hamburger” (“America’s Funnyman”).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Somewhere on the axis where David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and Joey Bishop intersect… Weirdly compelling if student-y and unfocused…”–Kyle Smith, New York Post (contemporaneous)

List Candidates, Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE (2008)

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Reader recommendation by Simon Hyslop

DIRECTED BY: Andrey Iskanov

FEATURING: Tetsuro Sakagami, Yukari Fujimoto, Manoush, Elena Probatova

PLOT: War prisoners are subjected to various horrifying experiments in the Japanese Imperial Army’s infamous Unit 731 facility.

Still from Philosophy of a Knife (2008)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Between the dreamlike cinematography, the unconventional, fractious narrative, and the bizarre attempts to blend a documentary with an arthouse film, this is definitely among the least conventional works of World War II cinema.

COMMENTS: A few short years before the outbreak of World War II, one General Shiro Ishii of the Japanese Imperial Army—a man who possessed a fatal combination of power, patriotism, intelligence and absolutely no regard for human life—oversaw the construction of a military facility in the Chinese province of Manchuria. Officially registered as a water purification plant, this facility—Unit 731, as it would come to be known—housed not only military personnel, but several thousand Chinese and Soviet prisoners, and a team of some of Japan’s top scientists. Over the next few years, these prisoners would be subjected to a series of horrifying, inhumane experiments in the name of helping the Japanese war effort. Prisoners were infected with deadly diseases, exposed to bomb blasts, and amputated and dissected without anesthetic.

And thanks to vested Cold War interests on the part of the USA, most of the perpetrators of these atrocities would walk away unpunished, and go on to enjoy prosperous careers.

This is the story that 2008’s Philosophy of a Knife—from one of modern Russia’s resident oddball directors, Andrey Iskanov—tells. Or, at least, purports to tell.

There’s a lot that needs to be said about Philosophy of a Knife, mostly because there’s so much of it. The film clocks in at over four hours; and while, admittedly, there are instances when it’s acceptable for a film to do that, I’m not convinced that Knife is one of them.

If there’s a key mistake this film makes, it’s in its genre. The film, it seems, is making a bold attempt to blend an art film with a documentary, combining stock footage, interviews and voiceover with heavily stylized reenactments of the experiments conducted at Unit 731. And while this is a debatable issue, I can’t see that blend as other than doomed to failure, since those genres are, in my opinion, irrevocably opposed. After all, any documentary worth its salt is going to try and be objective; while art, in any form—in my opinion— is inherently subjective. At least, until we’ve invented painting robots.

But even a viewer who disagrees with that particular perspective will probably agree that, as a documentary, Philosophy of a Knife‘s efforts are half-hearted at best. The voiceover segments—narrated by what sounds like a castrated Robbie Williams—cover only the most Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE (2008) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: River Phoenix, , William Richert

PLOT: A young, narcoleptic gay prostitute searches for his mother, with the help of a slumming fellow hustler who is heir to a fortune.

Still from My Own Private Idaho (1991)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: My Own Private Idaho weaves two weird premises together: the story of a narcoleptic searching for his mother and a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part I.” The movie then adds surreal touches and sets it all inside the world of gay street hustlers.

COMMENTS: Sometimes the line between a “glorious mess” and a plain old-fashioned mess can be very thin, and very personal, indeed. I couldn’t really argue with anyone who sees Idaho as an eccentric gem, but the film has always seemed more like a failed experiment to me. A “Henry IV” adaptation set in the world of street hustlers might have made a good movie (although Idaho suggests that a different approach, with less actual Shakespearean dialogue and no Keanu Reeves, may have been required). Similarly, a bittersweet indie about a narcoleptic hustler searching for his lost mom might have made a good movie. But when slapped together, the two storylines don’t really work; Idaho feels like an interesting story that keeps getting interrupted by a high school class’ Shakespeare rehearsal.

River Phoenix, only two years away from his fatal overdose, is beautifully cast as the fragile prostitute who falls into a spontaneous slumber when stressed (and the life of a street hustler does tend to arouse the occasional stressful situation). He’s dreamy, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word. Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, isn’t very good—but in this case, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At this point in his career, the world did not yet know that Reeves was a bad actor, and the same pseudo-sophisticated mannerisms that would earn him well-deserved jeers for his portrayal of Jonathan Harker in Dracula play here as a campy stylistic choice. Since his lean torso and boyish sensuality suit the character physically, his weak-jawed, ersatz Prince Hal somehow fits into the entire subplot’s unreal design. It’s a case of a director turning an actor’s weakness into the film’s strength. William Richert is fine as Bob, the Falstaff substitute. Regular readers will want to keep their eyes open for weirdo favorites (in a rare seductive role) and (in a more substantial and stranger part).

Mild surrealist touches (the hustlers carrying on a conversation from the covers of male jerk mags) jostle with gritty street realities and scenes lifted almost wholesale from “Henry” to form a concoction that is occasionally interesting and touching, but which also feels cobbled together and frustratingly inconclusive. Idaho does, however, unquestionably tilt toward the weird end of the spectrum. The Criterion Collection upgraded this catalog title to Blu-ray in October, 2015.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…cracked and beautiful… a strange duck of a film, beyond comparison: street-boy angst intermingled with Shakespearean conceit.“–Stephen Hunter, Baltimore Sun (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS (1985)

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AKA ZOO

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Brian Deacon, Eric Deacon, , , Frances Barber

PLOT: After the deaths of their wives in a freak car crash, the brothers Oswald and Oliver, both zoologists, pursue different paths of obsession in an attempt to cope with their losses.

Still from A Zed & Two Nougts (1985)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: As an art-house film, A Zed & Two Noughts succeeds with its precise interiors, high-minded dialogue, and a cavalcade of mise en scène goodies. Smashed into its philosophizing and clever conversation are decomposing animals, two differently unhinged brothers, a surgeon with an unhealthy obsession with Vermeer, and a borderline-spastic score from long-time Greenaway collaborator, Michael Nyman.

COMMENTS: Taking the idea of in medias res to its logical conclusion, A Zed & Two Noughts (hereafter to be referred to as ZOO) starts with a flash of photography and a smash of a white swan onto a white car. Inside, two women perish—and a third survives, only to have had her leg crushed beyond repair. So far, so good—but not so “art house”, I hear you think. Yet this unlikely (and grisly) beginning somehow morphs into one of the most precisely arranged specimens of film I’ve had the pleasure to watch. After climaxing in the first few minutes, the remainder acts as something of an extended dénouement, culminating in a comparably macabre, though more peaceful, conclusion.

Stylistically, ZOO is like nothing more than a painting. Every shot is impeccably staged, suggesting that director Peter Greenaway could give even a lesson or two on orderliness in the frame. Scene after scene exhibits meticulous use of vertical and horizontal framing: doorways, windows, mirrors. Those who know a thing or two about Greenaway will be unsurprised: he trained as a painter before beginning his career as a film-maker. The precision of the film’s look is mirrored within it by the surgeon Van Meegeren, who obsesses over the Dutch painter Vermeer, going so far as to try and recreate the latter’s masterpieces Lady Seated at Virginal and The Music Lesson, using the fiery-haired Alba Bewick (the survivor of the opening car crash) as a template. During her first surgery we see him lightly caress her exposed body; after convincing her that her second leg needs removal, we see the surgeon’s assistant provide Alba with a new hair-do and earrings to make her look more like the young women in the Vermeer paintings.

Somehow I have as yet to mention the centerpiece of this refined ostentation, the Deuce brothers. Oliver and Oswald Deuce are, combined, the main character of ZOO. At the film’s beginning, they are obviously identifiable as separate people. Oswald is, so to speak, the left brain: he starts by trying to work out the facts, the tiniest specifics, leading up the deadly car crash that took his wife’s life. Oliver, on the other hand, is right-brained. He contemplates the greater role that the cosmos played in the tragedy as part of his mourning process, watching David Attenborough’s “Life on Earth” program. He feels he needs to start from scratch–the TV series spans some millions of years of natural history—in order to work his way to how events conspired to take his wife from him.

Events proceed in a sinister direction. The brothers’ work starts as time-lapse photographs of rotting fruit, then small fish, and finally works up to their penultimate project: the recording of a zebra’s decomposition. Thrown into this mess of decay, philosophy, paintings, and obtrusive music is an aspiring bestiality writer, a zoo warden who moonlights procuring exotic meats, and sundry “unexplained” escapes of animals. ZOO poses some tough questions, perhaps the most important of which is educed by the zoo’s chief administrator: “What valuable conclusion can be gained from all this rotting meat?”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Greenaway’s eccentric exploration of where all life’s absurd varieties must begin and end is, like a road accident, always fascinating, if not exactly pleasurable, to watch.”–Anton Bitel, Movie Gazette